The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Sacks is a British neurologist and writer. His work with patients who have unusual neurological conditions has earned him the title of “the poet laureate of medicine.” Born in 1933 London to parents who were both doctors, Sacks earned a medical degree at Oxford and went on to practice in San Francisco and Los Angeles before moving to New York, where he remained until his death in 2015. While in New York, Sacks was a consulting neurologist for the Beth Abraham Center in the Bronx, a facility for “incurable” patients. There he worked with patients who had the “sleeping sickness,” which swept the world in the early 20th century. Later, with the help of poet W. H. Auden, he wrote a memoir called Awakenings (1973), which documented his experience using L-Dopa to bring these patients back to life. Sacks wrote many books about neurology during his life. Thirty years after publishing The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Sacks wrote an essay about how the patients he documented were still alive and thriving. That essay appears in the new edition.